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Empathic concern
Empathic concern refers to other-oriented emotions elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need.Batson, C.D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer. Hillsdale: Erlbaum Associates.Batson, C.D. (1987). Prosocial motivation: Is it ever truly altruistic? In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 20, pp. 65-122). New York: Academic Press. These other-oriented emotions include feelings of tenderness, sympathy, compassion, soft-heartedness, and the like. Empathic concern is often and wrongly confused with empathy. To empathize is to respond to another's perceived emotional state by experiencing feeling of a similar sort. Empathic concern or sympathy not only include empathizing, but also entails having a positive regard or a non-fleeting concern for the other person.Chismar, D. (1988). Empathy and sympathy: the important difference. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 22, 257-266. Human beings are strongly motivated to be connected to others.Batson, C.D. (1990). How social an animal? The human capacity for caring. American Psychologist 45: 336-346. In humans and other higher mammals, an impulse to care for offspring is almost certainly genetically hard-wired, although modifiable by circumstance. Evolutionary origins At the behavioral level it is evident from the descriptions of comparative psychologists and ethologists that behaviors homologous to empathic concern can be observed in other mammalian species. Notably, a variety of reports on ape empathic reactions suggest that, apart from emotional connectedness, apes have an explicit appreciation of the other's situation.De Waal, F.B.M. (1996). Good Natured: The origins of right and wrong in humans and other animals. Harvard: Harvard University Press. Harvard: Harvard University A good example is consolation, defined as reassurance behavior by an uninvolved bystander towards one of the combatants in a previous aggressive incident.De Waal, F.B.M., & van Roosmalen, A. (1979). Reconciliation and consolation among chimpanzees. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 5, 55-66. Developmental origins Empathic concern is thought to emerge later developmental and to require more self-control than either emotional contagion or personal distress.Eisenberg, N., & Strayer, J. (1997). Empathy and its Development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Developmental research indicates a broad range of social competencies children bring to their interpersonal relationships.Decety, J., & Meyer, M. (2008). From emotion resonance to empathic understanding: A social developmental neuroscience account. Development and Psychopathology, 20, 1053-1080. As early as 2 years of age, they show (a) the cognitive capacity to interpret, in simple ways, the physical and psychological states of others, (b) the emotional capacity to experience, affectively, the state of others, and © the behavioral repertoire that permits the possibility of attempts to alleviate discomfort in others.Zahn-Waxler, C, Radke-Yarrow, M., Wagner, E., & Chapman, M. (1992). Development of concern for others. Developmental Psychology, 28, 126-136. Both personal disposition such as temperament and social context contribute to individual differences in concern for others. Some developmental psychologists have hypothesized that empathic concern for others are essential factors inhibiting aggression toward others.Eisenberg, N., & Eggum, N.D. (2009). Empathic responding: sympathy and personal distress. In: J. Decety and W. Ickes, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp 71-83.Hoffman, M.L. (2000). Empathy and Moral Development. New York: Cambridge University Press. Contribution of social psychology Empathic concern may produce an altruistic motivation to reduce the other person's distress.Batson, C.D., & Shaw, L.L. (1991). Evidence for altruism: Toward a pluralism of prosocial motives. Psychological Inquiry, 2, 107-122). The challenge of demonstrating the existence of altruistic motivation is to show how empathic concern leads to helping in ways that cannot be explained by prevailing theories of egoistic motivation. That is, a clear case needs to be made that it is concern about the other person's welfare, not a desire to improve one's own welfare, that primarily drives one's helping behavior in a particular situation. Empirical studies conducted by social psychologist Daniel Batson has demonstrated that empathic concern is felt when one adopts the perspective of another person in need. His work emphasizes the different emotions evoked when imagining another situation from a self-perspective or imagining from another perspective.Batson, C.D. (2009). Two forms of perspective taking: imagining how another feels and imagining how you would feel. In K.D. Markman, W.M.P. Klein and J.A. Suhr (Eds.), Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation (pp. 267-279). New York: Psychology Press. The former is often associated with personal distress (i.e., feelings of discomfort and anxiety), whereas the latter leads to empathic concern. Social neuroscience evidence Social neuroscience explores the biological underpinnings of empathic concern and more generally interpersonal sensitivity, using an integrative approach that bridges the biological and social levels.Decety, J., & Keenan, J.P. (2006). Social neuroscience: A new journal. Social Neuroscience, 1, 1-4. Neural systems, including autonomic functions, that rely on brain stem neuropeptides, such as oxytocin and vasopressin, are plausible correlates for empathic concern. Alternatively, vasopressin might be implicated in situations where a more active strategy is required for an effective response.Carter, C.S., Harris, J., & Porges, S.W. (2009). Neural and evolutionary perspectives on empathy In: J. Decety and W. Ickes, The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge: MIT press, pp 169-182. An association between executive functions, underpinned by the prefrontal cortex with reciprocal connections with the limbic system, the sense of agency, and empathic concern has been suggested based on lesion studies in neurological patients and functional neuroimaging experiments in healthy individuals.Decety, J., & Jackson, P.L. (2004). The functional architecture of human empathy. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 3, 71-100. The difference between imaging self versus imaging other is supported by a series of functional neuroimaging studies of affective processing. For instance, Lamm, Batson and Decety (2007) found that participants reported more empathic concern when imagining the pain of others when adopting another perspective, and more personal distress when imagining themselves to be in pain.Lamm, C., Batson, C.D., & Decety, J. (2007). The neural substrate of human empathy: effects of perspective-taking and cognitive appraisal. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 42-58. The fMRI scans revealed that imagine self in pain was associated with strong activation in brain areas involved in affective response to threat and pain, including the amygdala, insula and anterior cingulate cortex. Imagine-other instructions produced higher activity in the right temporoparietal junction (or TPJ), which is associated with self-other distinctiveness and the sense of agency. See also * Affective neuroscience * Altruism * Empathy * Neuroscience of empathy * Prosocial behavior * Social neuroscience * Sympathy * Daniel Batson * C. Sue Carter * Jean Decety * W. D. Hamilton * Stephen Porges * Frans de Waal * Edward O. Wilson References Further reading * Batson, C.D. (2009). These things called empathy: eight related but distinct phenomena. In J. Decety & W. Ickes (Eds.), The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (pp. 3-15). Cambridge: MIT press. * Batson, C.D. (2009). Two forms of perspective taking: imagining how another feels and imagining how you would feel. In K. D. Markman, W.M.P. Klein and J.A. Suhr (Eds.), Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation (pp. 267-279). New York: Psychology Press. * Decety, J. & Batson, C.D. (2007). Social neuroscience approaches to interpersonal sensitivity. Social Neuroscience, 2(3-4), 151-157. * Decety, J. & Ickes, W. (Eds.). (2009). The Social Neuroscience of Empathy. Cambridge: MIT Press, Cambridge. * Thompson, E. (2001). Empathy and consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, 1-32. * Zahn-Waxler, C., & Radke-Yarrow, M. (1990). The origins of empathic concern. Motivation and Emotion, 14, 107-125. External links * Mirrored emotion by Jean Decety from the University of Chicago. Category:Neuroscience Category:Cognitive neuroscience Category:Emotion Category:Social psychology Category:Evolutionary biology Category:Sociobiology